I'll admit from the start that I'm not familiar at all with the plot or themes of the movie "Friday Night Lights". The front cover of this soundtrack has gridiron players on it, so I'll assume it's some kind of feel-good sports movie, perhaps featuring an autistic/immigrant/gay/crippled child who overcomes a series of trials and obstacles to score the winning touchdown in the final game of the season. Quite frankly, it sounds all rather dull and boring to me, especially as gridiron is not a game that I enjoy at all, so the soundtrack, being scored by Texan instrumental-rockers Explosions In The Sky is the only thing that really interests me about the whole matter.

"The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place" was one of my favourite albums of last year, almost sounding as if it had a plot and storyline all of its own, despite its complete lack of vocals, or any context surrounding the music. It therefore seemed natural that the band should go into the soundtrack business, and attempt to lend their musical grandeur and splendour to a visual presentation. Unfortunately, while "Friday Night Lights" offers tantalising glimpses what made "The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place" such a fantastic album, even going so far as to include Your Hand In Mine on it, but it's ultimately too passive to really stand on its own as a decent album.

Part of the reason for this is, of course, that the band has had to step into the shadows, and play second-fiddle to the movie. It simply wouldn't do, at least from the filmmakers point of view, to have the band cranking out tracks like Greet Death or First Breath After Coma, such a thing would take away from the immediacy of the film. This means that the songs are a lot more subdued and quiet compared to what we're used to, and it means in this case that the music is a lot less emotionally vivid. In short, it doesn't manage to create the emotional impact on its own that the band is capable of.

On a more technical level though, the band have come up with some interesting pieces. From West Texas is practically the only upbeat piece of music in the entire collection, infused with emotional tones of faint hope and longing. It's counterpart, To West Texas, is more downcast, four minutes of disjointed, repeating guitar melodies wrapped around a pulsing percussion line. On the other hand, some of the tracks here are quite disappointing, with the band using flourishes of synthesised strings and the like, presumably in an attempt to add more emotional impact to their songs, but in reality diluting the immediacy of the music. On some of the later tracks, the album descends into a blurry bed of pretty but empty guitar tone, with it being difficult to separate one song from the next.

A word should also be said about the three tracks on this album that do not feature Explosions In The Sky. Bad Company have a brief flash of glory with Seagull, providing the only testosterone-fuelled drinking song on the whole album, albeit one that's probably decent enough to listen to if you're drinking cheap beer with your mates. Daniel Lanois and David Torn both contribute tracks in here, but you'd probably be hard pressed to tell them apart from the rest of the album, so similar is their tone and content to the rest of the album.

The director of "Friday Night Lights" should be commended for taking a chance and getting a band that is relatively unknown in the mainstream to score his film, rather than stuffing it full of Queen songs. Unfortunately, like most soundtracks, the songs that the band have produced aren't their best work, and would probably have ended up on the cutting room floor if this was a "real" album. This might be an interesting item for dedicated Explosions In The Sky fans, but it just doesn't cut it as a stand-alone item.